Non-mainframe storage consolidation through storage area networking technologies is closing in on a decade of popularity, providing substantial cost savings and business value for organizations. In the early days, the predominant trend was to bring so-called distributed servers and storage into the data center under the management of IT professionals (aka 'guys in lab coats'). This simple step yielded benefits in terms of improved utilization and better processes (e.g. backup) that ultimately led to increased management efficiency. Things only got better when organizations aggressively adopted switched fabric and complimentary software exploitation techniques to drive storage efficiency.

There are three major trends that continue to provide impetus for consolidation:

Often distributed NAS storage, supporting end user files and unstructured data is under increasing pressure to be consolidated for compliance and archival storage initiatives.

Siloed 'San-lets' are being targeted as culprits for further cost reductions and recently, storage virtualization has started to catch the attention of organizations to address this problem.

Tiered storage is being enabled by improved software such as high performance data movers and classification tools, the wide availability of low cost SATA drives and storage virtualization technologies that make logical 'pooling' easier.

The following expectations and metrics can be used as rough guidelines to develop cost benefit analyses and business cases for successful storage consolidation efforts where the 'as is' state is a distributed or collocated set of servers and storage:

Storage TCO can be reduced from 10 - 50% depending on workload targeted for consolidation.

The more complex the workload, the harder to manage, the greater the savings that should be expected.

Storage capacity managed per admin should increase between 2-4X and sometimes more.

Disk utilization should increase from 40% or less to 60% and up. The starting and ending point in NAS consolidation is often ten points higher as NAS workloads tend to be easier to manage.

The people costs associated with managing storage will consume upwards of 65% of storage total cost of ownership (TCO) prior to a consolidation and can be reduced to less than 33% and often less than 20% over a period of 3-5 years. Again, NAS consolidations will tend to have a smaller portion of TCO consumed by staffing costs in both the as-is and to-be states.

The breakeven of consolidation projects will often be between 6 to 18 months, where the financials are calculated by comparing the as-is state projected over 5 years and compared with a consolidated installation over the same time period.

The IRR of storage consolidation projects should approach triple digits and should be well above typical 25% hurlde rates of IT projects.

The time to provision new storage or make changes to existing infrastructure for applications should be cut in half.

These figures are representative of hundreds of case studies conducted over a five year period and should be reasonably representative of 'good' projects. While not all storage consolidation projects will yield these results, if the workloads are consolidation friendly, deployment skills are adequate and mature technologies used, successful adoption of storage consolidation capabilities should demonstrate subtantially similar successes.